The political fringe loves the “other” political fringe,
The one they are fighting,
Because the more “fringy” the other becomes,
The stronger it makes each fringe,
The more each fringe becomes the center,
And from there to complete war,
Which is the only space they feel safe,
A world clearly divided into us and them,
with a clear purpose,
To fight.
Only solidarity defeats this.
The more solidarity the more the fringes are defeated,
The less solidarity the more they win the mainstream.
But solidarity requires real values clarification,
Real compromises in the search of common values,
Which takes leadership and courage from the few
Who can lead the frightened and confused many.

One of the greatest strategic thinkers from the right in Israel speaks his mind. He reflects the majority of the thinking of the military and intelligence upper echelons. But our biggest problem today is democratic lemmings…those who march obediently over cliffs of self-destruction created by demagogues.

I have been haunted by this short film for days. For those who do not know it is about Rainer Rainer Höß, grandson of the commandant of Auschwitz who murdered over 15 thousand human beings a day, at least one million, while raising his children in the camp. Anyone who wants to understand conflict analysis, reconciliation, and who lives with the shadows of Jewish life, should see this. I cannot stop thinking about this. I lost it 2/3 of way in. See it to the end.

Oh, yes, the answer to ISIS barbarity of burning someone to death, is definitely crucifixion. Al Azhar University, under Sisi is making great strides toward restoring decency to Middle Eastern civilization, don’t you think? The decent people of the Middle East have been completely silenced by certain tyrannical regimes on all sides. It is really time for a nonviolent reformation. The Arab Spring was too dramatic and too sudden. This is going to require a secular/religious coalition to restore the best values of a civilization that is being strangled.

By the way this group, whose financial and professional origins came from both secular and religious dictatorships of the middle east and Gulf, is simply taking one step further the complete dehumanization and sale of girls that was going on with others , the Baathists in Syria had already done in this with Iraqi refugee girls and Gulf clients and Gulf complicity, now Syrian girls with Gulf clients and now Isis just increases the horror. The horror looks religious on the surface but this is just mass criminality that will reign until there is a middle eastern reformation that will require secular and Religous people to join hands , and the major non middle eastern powers to stop supporting disgusting leaders and start supporting the better ones, and there are better ones. And for that to occur the world needs to get the hell off of oil fast. Oil is killing the planet on so many levels that I am real interested in next generation nuclear.

“Onlookers sometimes fired rifles and handguns hundreds of times into the corpse while people cheered and children played during the festivities. Pieces of the corpse were taken by onlookers as souvenirs of the event [5]. Such was the case when James Irwin was lynched on January 31, 1930. Irwin was accused of the murder of a white girl in the town of Ocilla, Georgia. Taken into custody by a rampaging mob, his fingers and toes were cut off, his teeth pulled out by pliers and finally he was castrated. It still wasn’t enough. Irwin was then burned alive in front of hundreds of onlookers (Brundage, p. 42). No one was ever punished for this barbaric killing. Black victims were hacked to death, dragged behind cars [6], burned, beaten, whipped, sometimes shot thousands of times, mutilated; the savagery was astonishing. How could ordinary people participate in such brutality?”

So these are scenes from a democracy, crica 1930. Does anyone think that a bombing and elimination campaign by Britain, of Klan members and other Southerners would have been effective to get rid of this American ISIS? How well do you think that would have gone? What happened instead? How is this now so buried in history that no one even believes Americans capable of such behavior, only those Muslims over there….What eliminated this white, American Christian Isis?

If you spend 70% of your time constructively critiquing your own people, your own country, your religion, your groups, then you are probably on the right side of history. If you spend 90% of your time defending your own and attacking others, you are probably not doing much good for anyone. Your own are not learning anything from you, and your adversaries just hate you more .

When I grew up in America,
I wore a minority lens,
And it corrected,
For Legal blindness,
To injustice.
They are trifocals,
So that I can see the close,
and the near,
and the far.
For I was orthodox,
a minority within the minority Jewish, within the majority Christian,
and white.
It has taken a long time,
But now when I travel,
to the Holy Land,
I stay with the minority,
I sleep with the minority,
I dance with the minority,
and I dream with the minority. Because it is only
with that lens,
that I can see the close,
And the near,
And the far,
and the golden light,
of the setting sun
over the sea,
and the rising sun
over the desert,
And the light that removes,
The blinding desert storms,
Or human ones.

At a minimum a Zionist is one who loves Zion, often a Jew, but sometimes a Christian. At a minimum, an Islamist is someone who loves Islam, usually a Muslim. I see no reason to use either term in pejorative or hateful way, as a curse or as a condemnation. Associated with Zionism has been all manner of crimes against the native Palestinian people for over a hundred years, associated with Islamism has been tens of thousands of victims of crimes across the world, mostly Muslim victims. But it is an empirical fact that thousands of Zionists and millions of Islamists repudiate the crimes associated with these respective labels. They claim this is not true Zionism or true Islamism. We should agree as a global community to recognize the existence of these people, in fact to honor them. We can disagree with their philosophy but we should not label and dehumanize them.

I am no longer going to use the word “Islamist” in a pejorative way, I am going to retire it from my lexicon. I am going to use the word extremist or criminal when it comes to ISIS, Al Qaeda, or any other group that advocates coercion in religion or killing of civilians. It would be great if I could live in a world where the Muslim world no longer uses the word Zionist as a curse word, because in effect it becomes an assault on most Jews and certainly all Israelis. This is not helpful. The old adage of Beruriah, the great lady of the Talmud, remains true: Hate the sin and not the sinner. My read: Condemn the crime, do not label people, because then you will end up becoming a criminal yourself. I remember my years in Syria among Baathist officials who always screamed against and condemned “the Zionists” while abusing their own citizens especially poor Palestinians, while I “the Zionist” had spent half my life working together with Palestinians in Palestine. It amused me how stupid they were, but now it is not so funny. Now look at what these officials did with 200,000 dead, half an entire civilization and country exiled.

I am asking the Left and the Right to stop labeling, condemning, and hating, and start building bridges. I am asking Left and Right to condemn violence and crime, not people, and certainly not with labels which are the foundations of dehumanization.